Progress brings order, control to SOA with Actional 7

Progress Software has announced the immediate availability of its Progress Actional 7 SOA management platform that comprises a trio of products addressing the diversity of management needs in service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments.

The Actional SOA management product family provides monitoring, analysis, security and policy control, including system and process-level visibility, and policy enforcement across an SOA.

Actional 7.0 introduces three new standalone products:

* Progress Actional for SOA operations;
* Progress Actional for continuous service optimisation; and
* Progress Actional for active policy enforcement.

"Numerous SOA stakeholders work on separate schedules, follow different workflows, and have very diverse, but unique needs," says Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa.

"Ironically, most SOA management and governance vendors are moving towards offering one-size-fits-all monolithic platforms predominantly focused only on one group, often the service developers. The other SOA stakeholders are forced to compromise with a solution that either under-serves or over-complicates their requirements.

"For example, to provide the best security or visibility, they must depend on service developers, whose priorities and timelines are rarely the same. Actional 7 offers a choice of products that directly addresses the needs of each distinct SOA stakeholder."

Brad Shimmin, principal analyst of applications infrastructure for Current Analysis, says: "While it may seem counter-intuitive, the decision to move to a service-oriented architecture is not always driven across the entire company as a single initiative. Often, the initial reason for pursuing an SOA solution is based on the needs of a single department, or driven by the goals of a single project, yet future enterprise needs and scalability are still a concern.

"Progress Software has recognised this trend and is addressing it with the latest iteration of its Actional SOA management platform and its three standalone SOA modules."

Each Actional product can be deployed independently to address the needs of a specific SOA audience or combined to accomplish multiple goals. They also work in concert with complementary SOA products, such as application platforms, enterprise service buses, registries, repositories, and security appliances, as well as testing and development tools.

Actional for SOA operations addresses the needs of teams that own shared SOA infrastructure and common services. These teams are rarely responsible for building services and do not have the intimate knowledge of how they work; however, they are responsible for ensuring their organisations' end-to-end applications are functioning correctly for all consumers.

Only Actional for SOA operations can automatically discover and correlate process flows across multiple tiers and technologies.

This is the key to bridging the knowledge gap between service developers and shared infrastructure teams.

Actional for continuous service optimisation addresses the needs of service owners and service providers.

These teams recognise their success is measured continuously by optimising the business value they deliver, and judge their services from a business context; for example, whether service level agreements (SLAs) are being met, key business indicators are positive, or that multi-step and long-running, end-to-end, business processes are operating within expectations.

Only Actional for continuous service optimisation can relate the execution of an end-to-end business process to underlying services, even as the process changes.

Actional for active policy enforcement addresses the needs of SOA security and compliance teams.

Historically, service developers were responsible for implementation because they knew the details of the services necessary to enforce real-world policies - yet this led to inconsistent enforcement of policies, increasing cost and risk.

The combination of central policy authoring, business-level policy definition, and the ability to upgrade policy on live services with no failed transactions, is a unique feature of Actional for active policy enforcement. Actional is the first product to fully separate the life cycle of SOA security and compliance policy from the service development life cycle, which allows SOA security and compliance teams to own the implementation of the policies from end-to-end.

"Given the stringent security and privacy requirements in healthcare, we can't take risks when it comes to managing compliance," says Hong Lou, associate director of Application Development, Partners Healthcare. "With Actional for active policy enforcement, our security team can enforce policy consistently across our infrastructure, letting us focus and simplify the skill-set of our application developers."

"Our partners and their customers in SA have reacted with excitement to Actional whenever they have been exposed to it," says Parry. We expect this trio of products to engender equal or greater excitement, and to continue to spur SOA adoption in SA."